Long Island University’s Humanities Gallery presents the group exhibition, RE: MATERIAL. The group exhibition brings together the work of five local artists: Robert Deeds, Susan Griswold, Joshua Hart, Tom Kotik, and Patrick Paine. In selecting material to present their ideas, each of these artists have in common the act of re-looking, re-thinking, and re-considering cultural and societal systems concerning access, consumption, and the absurd.

In re-appropriating materials found near his studio at the Texas Firehouse Gallery and Performance Space in Long Island City, Deeds’ sculptures serve not only as a veiled document of his life, but as examples of how we, as freeloaders on the planet earth, relate to one another. Griswold, who works in the Hudson Valley, pays tribute to our western, post-industrial mindset she describes as a “unique combination of greed and complacency.” Large in scale, her works are formalized interpretations of odd or obsolete structures such as water towers, mineheads, or grain elevators. Hart, working from his studio in Industry City Brooklyn, re-examines meeting places, modes, and materiality, indicating how the changes in these are “an other-than-visual questioning belonging in the sense of including, together with, overlapping and seeming and being the same.” Kotik searches for what he has termed the “architecture of silence,” focusing on the materials and politics of silence and re-considering the role of sound in our lives. Paine, the show’s organizer, builds on an interest in systems and the geometry used in contemporary architecture, presenting work that blurs the distinction between inside and outside, boundary and volume.

The artists in RE: MATERIAL share a common background in art handling for NYC-area museums. Robert Deeds, a Texas native who completed his BFA at Lamar University, exhibits regularly with the Texas Firehouse. Susan Griswold, an Ohio native who currently lives in the Hudson Valley, holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University and has completed numerous public installations of her sculptural work. Joshua Hart, a native of California who holds an MFA from Bard College, currently teaches at MassArt and Harvard and bases his studio practice in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Tom Kotik, a Czech-born Brooklyn native who holds his MFA from Hunter College, has exhibited widely in the US and internationally. Patrick Paine, a Tennessee native who is completing his MFA from SUNY New Paltz, has worked as a studio assistant at LIU Brooklyn since 2005 and will be included in a juried showcase of NYC-area graduate students at Hunter College during the CAA conference in February. Paine is the show’s curator and organizer.